A Child Is Waiting (1963)

Directed by John Cassavettes. Starring Burt Lancaster, Judy Garland, Steven Hill, Gena Rowlands, Bruce Ritchey, Lawrence Tierney, Paul Stewart, John Marley, Elizabeth Wilson, Barbara Pepper.

Garland’s penultimate film role is a teacher who arrives at a state mental hospital and disrupts the strict order maintained by Lancaster’s director. She takes a special interest in a child (Ritchey) described by the director as occupying “a very special place in our institution: he represents one of our most spectacular failures,” and believes that reuniting the boy with the divorced parents who abandoned him years ago could be the key to his rehabilitation. Director Cassavettes and producer Stanley Kramer reportedly clashed frequently during production because of their incompatible filmmaking principles and philosophies on the story’s subject, and the friction is felt in the character relationships. Much as the characters are divided, however, so is the film’s attitude and technique; between honesty and pandering, and confused enough to spell out sentimentality but never get around to expressing it. Joseph LaShelle’s subjective camerawork can be a liability at its most attention-grabbing. Written by Abby Mann from his own novel of the same name.

59/100